Video DownloadHelper Companion App 1.1.3

Some operations required by Video DownloadHelper cannot be performed form within the browser.
In order to be able to still do the job, the add-on relies on an external application that is
called transparently. We call it the Companion Application.

Recommended installation method

Mac OS - dmg

Windows

It provides a way to write files to the disk. The only ways to write a file from
a browser add-on is to use the downloads API which basically takes an URL
and transfers the data verbatim to the downloads directory. Even if the downloaded
data can be generated internally by the add-on, it is not suitable to writing big
files like videos. The ability to write files from an add-on was present in Firefox
but does not exists in Chrome nor Firefox (>= 57). Writing files from the add-on is
necessary when downloading streams using protocols HLS and DASH.

It contains a build of the very popular ffmpeg video converter application. This is
required by the add-on to create audio+video files when audio and video data are streamed
separately. This is also necessary if you want to perform any conversion operation
on the downloaded media. Previously, you also had to download a converter for those
operations on Firefox (and conversion/aggregation was not supported on other browsers).

Running the companion app cannot be simpler: you don't have anything to do.
Video DownloadHelper will take care of calling the app whenever it requires
an operation that cannot be done from within the browser. You won't see anything
except a nice result.

Installing the companion application is also very simple: you just have a regular
installer that you execute once and you are done. On Mac, contrarily to the previous
converter for Firefox that was hard to install (involving the installation of the
homebrew intermediate installer), you now just have to download
a pkg file and doublie-click on it.